Doorstep conversion

A few days ago, I opened the door to two earnest looking people, one of whom was pulling a copy of The Watchtower from her bag. I reacted quickly, telling them that I wasn’t interested in talking to them. A couple of minutes later, I saw from my window that they were part of a larger group of Jehovah’s Witnesses who were visiting every house nearby.

This pair were lucky. My girlfriend and daughter were with me, so I decided not to let them have the benefit of my thoughts on religion. I’m not always so polite. About a year ago, two kindly old ladies from one of the local churches interrupted my morning to ask me what I thought about God. They were somewhat taken aback when I asked them why they thought it made sense to worship a self-confessed serial mass murderer. They backed away more rapidly than I would have thought possible.

I have a friend who’s something of an evangelical type. For several years he’s tried to convince me that the theory of evolution is wrong, that God created everything, and that Richard Dawkins is a belligerent fundamentalist atheist who wants to ban religion. Apparently, evolution can never create information, so therefore it must be false. (He doesn’t understand that mutations increase information in the genome, while natural selection picks out the stuff that works.) He accepts (reluctantly) that the Earth is old, but has a fascination with cryptozoology, because if one single living dinosaur could be found, he could justify his belief that dinosaurs are mentioned in the Bible. And so on.

Before he started trying to convert me, I had only a vague understanding of this stuff. But he’d keep throwing things at me that sounded ridiculous, so I looked them up. A favourite of his is the idea bandied about by Creationists that the woodpecker’s tongue could never have evolved, thus proving the existence of a creator. In vain have I pointed him at the truth about this – he never reads anything that contradicts what he ‘knows’. If he ever visited the Index to Creationist Claims (I’ve given him the link) his head would probably explode.

Another thing that he hasn’t read is Dawkins’ The God Delusion, but that doesn’t stop him telling me what’s in it (he’s usually wrong) and that it’s an awful book (because another atheist told him it was). I’ve offered to lend him my copy, but he hasn’t yet taken me up on it. He probably never will.

But back to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. What on Earth do they expect to achieve? Do they ever convert anybody? Many years ago, they pushed a booklet through my letterbox that told me all about God’s wondrous creation, including how the Sun goes round the Earth. I suspect that they really believed that, but my only response was laughter. Which I think is probably the best reaction to anyone who tries to tell you about their loving God. You know: the one who does all the killing in the Bible. The one who’ll torture you forever for the crime of not believing in him.

And finally: ever been doorstepped by an atheist? Thought not.